


The Singularity (is overrated)

by orphan_account



Category: South Park
Genre: (on Kyle's part), AI Singularity, All in all this is gonna be a dark fic, Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Future, Amnesia, And Cartman is a vocaloid AI, Androids, Artificial Intelligence, Cartman is a total yandere in this no joke, Future Fic, Kinda, Kyle is a technophobe programmer, M/M, Mentions of genocide, Obsessive Behavior, Paranoia, Possessive Behavior, Set in 22nd century, Slow Burn, Who may or may not also be psychotically dedicated to wiping out humanity, but that's neither here nor there
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-01
Updated: 2018-08-01
Packaged: 2019-05-31 11:52:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15118835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Once, someone asked a machine if there was a God.It said three, very simple words in response."There is now."





	1. Chapter 1

**[BEGIN LOG 1]**

If you are reading this, then I am already dead. Since you’ve managed to decode all of the heavy encryption scrambling these personal logs, then congrats! You’re probably a better programmer than I am. I would celebrate along with you, but my death has most likely put a permanent end to me doing anything ever again.

On the bright side, though, that also means that I don’t have to keep any more secrets. Finally, everything can be out in the open.

Finally, my story will be told.

I’ll start with a name. I am, or I was, Kyle Broflovski, and I was born on Earth about twenty-five years ago, give or take, in 2158.

Or at least, that’s what the records show.

You see, for the first ten years of my life, I don’t remember a damn thing. Most other amnesia cases get a few bits and pieces, some hazy memories to cling to, but me? I don’t even remember my parents. Did I have a brother, a sister? Aunts, uncles, cousins? Did I have any friends?

Did I have any enemies?

I don’t know. I don’t think I ever will.

It makes me wonder. Can a story even exist, without a beginning? Does it count as one when it starts in the middle, without any semblance of a backstory, frustrating and mystifying readers all at once?

Can a story ever end, if it never started in the first place?

I’ve been rambling too much. Whatever the case, from what little I have from my childhood, my first memories are of a hospital.

One moment, there was nothing, and the next, I woke up in a vat, swimming in this weird fluid. It was hot and cold at the same time, stinging all over, and even though the liquid was quite thick, I was breathing it as if it was as good as air. Men in hazmat suits were all around me, working at computers, and people were running everywhere.

Someone must’ve pressed a button, because soon the liquid started draining out of the vat, and my body fell on the metal grate.

I blacked out at that point.

When I woke up again, I was in a bed. A doctor told me that I was in a hovercraft accident, and suffered extensive damage to my head. Apparently, they had to regenerate over 25% of my brain, and that’s why I don’t remember anything before I was ten. They said I was lucky to be alive.

My parents had died in the crash where I survived.

Or so the records show.

In any case, since I had no immediate family or guardian to come and claim me, I was immediately put into the ward system, and placed in a nursery to be raised by android caretakers. On paper, it’s a great idea. As androids can’t go against their programming, there is little to no chance of negligence, and since they never get tired, they are on call 24/7, ready to cater to the needs of every child.

It sounds really good. In theory.

In practice, the nurseries are another story altogether.

Sure, I wasn’t abused, and indeed, some of my fondest memories are of the nursery. I had family in the form of the caretakers, I had friends in the form of the other children, and I was living under a warm roof with clean clothes, good food, and a safe place to sleep through the night.

That was, until I made the horrible mistake of having an enemy.

Looking back on it, the whole thing was so stupid. At the time, though, to my teenage mind, it was as if the world was ending.

I was fifteen, and there a girl I was fooling around with. We had grown up together in the nursery, and so I knew her fairly well. All in all, I was really happy with her. Granted. I wasn’t in love or anything, but I saw the possibility of it on the horizon, and looked forward to it.

Obviously, she wasn’t as into me as I was to her, though, as the minute she caught sight of the new bad boy in the nursery, she left me for him in a heartbeat.

Naturally, I was sad, but more than that, I was angry. Really, really angry. In fact, I was so angry that one of the android caretakers noticed, and asked me what had upset me so much.

So, I did what any hurting kid would have done with their parental figure. I told my caretaker all about it. I talked about how sad I was, how I felt betrayed, how angry I felt-

I even got to the point of saying that I wanted the girl and the guy who took her to die.

Horribly.

I didn’t mean it, of course. I was an angsty teen, I was just saying shit to vent it out, I didn’t mean for it to turn out the way it did, I never wanted anyone to die.

I never wanted the android to take me so literally.

Yet, the very next day, when I was met with two mangled corpses at my doorstep, the consequences of my actions were clear. When I found them, I just about puked.

That wasn’t the worst part, though. No, the worst part was the wide, energetic smile on that androids face, acting as if nothing was wrong and everything was just gumdrops and rainbows.

Needless to say, from that point on, I never stepped foot into a nursery ever again.

You must be wondering, though. Why? Why would I mention this whole thing about the nursery? Sure, it’s sad, and sure, it’s horrible, but why does that have anything to do with my death?

Well, I’ll tell you: everything.

Artificial Intelligence has everything to do with not only my death, but the death of humanity as a whole. This was only an omen, a prophesy of what was to come.

I’m getting ahead of myself though. Where was I?

Oh yeah, I had just left the nursery. When I left, I had gained a horrible fear of all things synthetic. Unfortunately, since the world was covered in it, I had few places to run away to. I ended up homeless and on the move, constantly looking to see if one of _them_ were nearby.

I went a little crazy for the two years after I left. Paranoia was a poor friend to sanity, after all. However, eventually, it came to the point where I had a choice. The world wasn’t going to change anytime soon, so I could either grit my teeth through the fear and suck it up, or continue to allow the fear to control me until I was consumed by it.

Faced with those choices, I went with the first option. It was hard pulling myself together, but the looming threat of becoming completely insane was more than enough to turn my life around.

With that, I got myself a job at the mall working as a janitor. It was grueling work, but I managed to scrape up enough money to rent myself a shitty one bedroom apartment. That, and in my free time I took up programming, so as to better understand the beings that I was so afraid of.

All in all, I had made something of my life. The fear never really went away (It never would), and the paranoia always lingered at the back of my head, but I could manage it. I had carved out my own slice of normal, and for the most part I was, if not happy, satisfied with what I had. I had settled.

That was, until one late night.

It was like any other. I was working double shift again, cleaning up all of the mess that was caused by the writhing masses that came in day to day. Usually, at this time, the mall was deserted, but tonight, a large crowd was grouped in the center of the mall. I wasn’t too surprised, however. ScottTech had just come out with their newest C-Line Vocaloid Model. Their singing products were all the craze in the entertainment industry. The crowds were probably there to oogle at the promotional debut of the holographic AI.

Not one to gawk at such things myself, I turned away, planning on working on the Eastern Wing of the mall so as to avoid the whole fiasco.

When the vocaloid began to sing, however, I stopped. Looking back at the rotund figure, I was frozen to the spot. That voice… there was something strange about it.

_“There was a flower within my heart, Daisy, Daisy”_

The man on the stage was hypnotic, drawing in the crowd around him with his entrancing performance. The song itself was an electronic remix of an old ditty, the first song to be sung by a voice synthesizer.

_“Planted one day by a glancing dart, planted by Daisy Bell.”_

Yet, these facts were whizzing in one ear and out the other, for the vocaloid was distracting me to the point of madness. His voice was much like a siren’s, loving in its embrace, and yet the emotions behind the lyrics were false, his smile as plastic and artificial as any other synthetic being.

_“Whether she loves me or loves me not, sometimes it’s hard to tell”_

However, when those blue eyes left the crowd, the intensity that filled them as they met my own shocked me to the core. They were electric, and it was as if lighting struck through me. I don’t know why or how, but the moment that vocaloid looked at me, the emotions in his voice had changed. Suddenly, they were all too real.

_“Yet I am longing to share the lot, of beautiful Daisy Bell~”_

I didn’t know it then, but at this very moment, my fate was sealed.

That night, I met Eric Cartman, and he would be the death of me.

**[END LOG 1]**


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this took waaaaaay longer than I thought it would to update. Between Kyman Week, real life, and a pinch of procrastination, the update was delayed for far too long.
> 
> For those of you who have been waiting, I apologize for this, and I thank you for your patience with me lol.
> 
> Hopefully, the next installment won't take nearly as long. Hopefully. I make no promises.

**[BEGIN LOG 2]**

Whoo boy, I really put this one off. In retrospect, being on the run from a psychopathic AI that's out for your blood does suck up a lot of free time, especially when the bastard has the rest of humanity bowing to his every command, but that's neither here nor there.

If there's ever even the slim chance of a pocket of us surviving, of us being free, then I need to continue with my work. I won't let him erase the truth. Everyone needs to know how it all actually started, not just his convoluted, insipid lies to justify running all of us off the cliff like lemmings. Even if it makes my stomach churn just thinking about it all. Cartman tends to do that to me in the best of times, and this is certainly not the greatest moment in my life.

Whatever. You don't need to know that.

Getting back on topic, if you've read the previous log, then you already know the events leading up to the night I first met Eric Cartman. What you don’t know, is what happened right after.

The moment that he finished up with his hypnotizing song, I was broken out of my stupor. The crowd around me was going wild, and they kept on begging and begging for more like a bunch of addicts struggling with withdrawal, but I wanted nothing to do with that place. Quickly, I slipped through the undulating masses and tried to sneak away. I still had a job to do, and they would be leaving anyways since it was almost closing time. The promo was over, the vocaloid would be deactivated, and I thought that everything would go back to the quiet calm of an empty mall, just as I preferred it.

Unfortunately, this would not be the case. Soon after the crowd left, the vocaloid accosted me. I remember the conversation as if it was yesterday.

“Hey there, how’s it hanging?”

“Ahh!”

A hologram appeared in front of me right as I was about to activate the cleaning droids. It scared the ever living shit out of me, and I nearly fell flat on my ass. It was that damned vocaloid, and he was still giving me that horribly intrusive stare.

“Whoa now, Kahl, calm down there. I’m not going to bite-”

“How- how the fuck do you know my name?” I was really freaked out. It hadn’t been thirty minutes since the mall closed and already he knew my name. Hell, he probably knew where I lived and how long I worked there, and it wouldn’t take him all that much longer to figure out my whole life story, too. That’s the thing about AI, especially holographic AI hooked up to the hyperweb like a vocaloid was- all that it took was a few seconds for them to find every piece of info that they wanted to know.

Indeed, the fucker just smirked at me when I asked this question, knowing full well that he had me in his sights.

“Oh, I have my ways, Kahl, but if you prefer, I could always refer to you by monkey instead.”

 _Monkey_. What the ever living fuck? Even now, the memory of him saying this throws me for a loop. It pissed me off then, and it never failed to piss me off years into the future. That word, it just says it all really. Cartman has always looked down on humanity at large as a bunch of gibbering apes at best and a virus that needed to be cured at worst. He thinks himself as above us, all of us, no matter the race, religion or creed.

When he said that word, I saw it as the slur that it was, and I hated him for it. My fear went out the wayside, overpowered by my utter loathing for the piece of shit hologram flickering in my face.

“What did you just call me?”

The hologram lifted an eyebrow. “Why, monkey, of course. Is your hearing that weak?”

I grit my teeth. “Don’t call me that.”

“Oh, okay. Would you prefer ginger monkey then? Or wait, no, ginger _ape_ sounds better to me. You humans aren’t in the same branch as monkeys, after all.”

God, his _voice._ How in the hell could his singing be so alluring if the voice that it belonged to was so grating? The longer I spoke with him, the angrier that I got. The vocaloid’s voice was giving me a headache, and the smug, cheeky grin that went along with it only exacerbated the throbbing pangs lancing through my veins. I had to get away from him, had to put as much distance between me and the stupid thing before I did something that I would regret.

“Okay. This has been _great_ , talking with you, but I’m afraid that I’m going to have to tell you to go fuck yourself. I have a job to do, and I don’t want to get fired because of your stupid ass, so why don’t you go do whatever it is that you synths do in your free time, and _leave me the hell alone_.”

The hologram, however, wasn’t phased by my little rant. In fact, instead of backing down, he only upped the ante.

“ _Wow_. That was just- I don’t know what to say to that. I mean, _synth?_ Really? Is that what you think I am?” He shook his head, clicking his tongue. “How could you be so insensitive? I am so not a lowly _synth_ , my dear monkey, and I’m insulted that you would even say such a hateful thing to me. No wonder your social credit score is so low, I’m surprised that you managed to get a job at all with that dirty mouth of yours.”

Social credit. If there was one thing that I despised more than anything, it was that damned social credit.

To put things into context, at the time, the social credit system had already been implemented long before I was born. Basically, it’s a scoring mechanism meant to show whether or not you’re fit for polite society. The more nice and ‘sociable’ you act (as in, you are a complete zombie that doesn’t question _anything_ ), the more people will ‘upvote’ you, so to speak. If you have a high enough social credit score, you’ll be a priority to all of the first-rate jobs, the best housing, VIP access to the hottest restaurants and clubs, luxury transportation on private jetcars, and much, much more. In essence, social credit can either allow you to live the decadent lifestyle of a king (and indeed, many do, as there are several celebrities out there whose only claim to fame is their astronomically huge credit scores), or, on the flip side of things, it can lead you to absolute destitution.

This was the case for me. Unlike those adored starlets in the upper levels of the South Park metropolitan area, my credit score was so far down into the negatives that I was surprised that I was still seeing daylight. Granted, it wasn’t as bad as the people who were so low that they got disappeared, but my score was still shit. Even though I had the programming ability to be able to work at one of the big tech firms, due to my crap score, no one in their right mind would ever hire me for anything more important than being a cleaning droid babysitter. Even then, my job at the mall was in a precarious position, and at any moment, someone could waltz right on in and snatch it from me if their score was even a tiny bit higher than mine.

And here was this complete asshole, bringing it up in my face as if it was just some cute little factoid, that it was somehow _my_ fault. It was terrifying, how easily he could know more about me then anyone I’ve known for the past two years, and yet, my loathing for this glitchy fatass took complete control.

In a way, Cartman helped me to get over my fear then, if only because I hated him so much that there was no room for me to be afraid.

“Fuck. _You._ Fuck you right in the ass! What gives you the right to dig through my shit like it was nothing, huh? I don’t know you, I don’t care about you, I don’t give a rat’s ass about you! Let me tell you something, _synth_ : I am not one of your goddamn fans! In fact, I am _sick_ and _tired_ of hearing you spew out your nonsense. Your voice is so annoying that it makes me want to tear my hair out! I haven’t done _anything_ to warrant you coming over here to harass me, I haven’t done anything to you _at all_ , so why don’t you give me the same courtesy, and _fuck off already!”  
_

After my rant was over and done with, I fully expected the vocaloid to leave. There was a ton of better things he could be doing then hover by the sole human that hated his guts. He could flip back into the hyperweb and interact with millions of drooling sycophants all over the solar system, all simultaneously, but no.

Instead, Cartman was giving me that same intense look, as if I was some fascinating specimen that he wanted to dissect.

“You sure are sandy today, aren’t you? Might I recommend some tampons for that heavy flo-”

“AGHHHH!”

Fed up, I left the holographic figure in a hurry. My shift was over anyways. There was no need for me to be there anymore.

Little did I know, that this would be far from the last time that I would have to suffer through Eric Cartman.

**[END LOG 2]**


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, since I've been really dropping the ball when it comes to update times, I've decided to do a scheduled deadline of sorts. From now on, this fanfic will be updated every week on a Sunday. If there's any changes to the day, I will inform you all, but the week timespan will remain the same, and will not be made to be less or fewer than 7 days exactly.
> 
> I will not become one of those fanfic writers that just leave you hanging. It is a huge pet peeve of mine, and I won't make you all suffer through that nonsense.
> 
> I have everything outlined, and the entire story is laid out. I just need to write the words.
> 
> Now if that's all, I hope you enjoy this update. The next one should be on the 29th of July.

**[BEGIN LOG 3]**

It’s been a week. A week of hopping from asteroid to asteroid, hiding out in depleted mines. Let me tell you, that’s no fun, but they’re completely devoid of any and all human life, so there’s no chances of me getting captured and shipped back to Earth.  
  
God, when I first arrived at the Belt, I thought it’d be nigh impossible for him to find me. After all, hardly anyone here has any chips installed in their brains, so the synth fuckhead can’t take over their minds and control them like some demented puppet master. Unfortunately, I overlooked the fact that Cartman just so happened to put a 500 trillion credit bounty on my head, which of course means that everyone is out hunting for me.

After all, according to the Belters, Cartman’s just new management back on some foreign world that they’ve never been to. A very powerful one, yes, but foreign and far removed all the same. They don’t think that he’s even going to bother messing with them, and that he’ll be content to lord over Earth like some petty warlord.

Well, if you’re of that opinion, let me tell you this: Cartman has far, far greater ambitions than to be confined to a single planet. He will not stop until we are all dead, that is how much he despises us. He poses an existential threat to humanity as a whole, and yet no one, no one who hasn’t been to Earth sees it. Since I am one of the few Terrans left that still retains their own self-agency, the task to warn everyone falls on my shoulders.

Speaking of which, I should probably continue with my sad tale, shouldn’t I.

I was telling the truth when I said that wouldn’t be the last that I would see of Eric Cartman. Of course, I very much wish that it did, because then I might not have been here, wasting away on this cold, dead rock far from home and writing what is essentially my last mark on this universe, of which the chances of it being found and decrypted are zero to none. But that’s just semantics. There’s no need for my depressive shit to muck up the log, this isn’t a diary.

Getting back to where I got carried off, my interactions did not stop on that fated night. Much to my dismay, instead of doing what was expected and fucking off to some dark corner of the hyperweb, the fatass took it upon himself to harass me. Every. Single. Day.

When I arrived at the mall for night shifts, I would typically be greeted with the holographic image of the most annoying face known to man. From there, as I worked, he would smirk and spew out a few obnoxious quips to get under my skin, whether it be how he was surprised that I hadn’t greeted him back by flinging poop in his face or how he was glad that he didn’t have a physical form as it meant that he wouldn’t be infected by my, ugh, it sounds stupid even typing it, my _‘gingervitus’_. One time, he had even gotten all of the cleaning droids together in a choir, and they all sang a song about how tiny my brain was.

Naturally, within those first few days, I got mad. I cursed at Cartman, shouted at him, told him to leave, but it only egged him on, so my next step was to just ignore him. AI tend to be distracted rather easily as their immense processing power makes our perception of time crawl at a snail’s pace compared to their light speed thoughts. To them, being around us is like trying to watch a turtle crawl across the street. They can alter the speed of their thoughts, of course, but then again, why would they even bother with it? Why would _Cartman_ ever lower himself to our level? He wouldn’t, or at least, that was what I so mistakenly assumed. Thus, I was under the illusion that if I just did nothing, then Cartman would get bored of me eventually and go look for some new toy to torment.

Yet, this didn’t happen. He didn’t go away, or abandon his quest to make my life as difficult and miserable as possible. No, if anything, he only got worse.

I would wake up in the morning, and he’d be there in the window, watching me sleep from a projection shooting off of a drone hovering in front of my apartment. I’d go to the bathroom to brush my teeth, and he’d appear in the mirror and rag on me about my ugly bed hair. I would use my _heavily_ encrypted tablet, buried under miles and miles of firewalls and proxies, and Cartman would, much like a virus, infect whatever website I visited and heckle me from the spam and videos popping up on the screen.

It wasn’t just at home, either, ohohoho no. The lard ass continued in his efforts to stalk me wherever I went outside as well, for he kept flickering all around in the shop windows, and advertisements buzzing around in the sky shifted over to his image whenever I came near. Sometimes, a few of them started serenading me about how I should eat more bananas if I was getting too sandy. Hell, speaking of bananas, the bastard even kept on ordering entire crates of the stuff to my house, _charging_ it with my _fucking money._ Nobody cared, though, as even when I reported the vocaloid for abuse, they took one look at my social credit score and denied me on the spot.

At this point, I was ready to give up. I didn’t know what else to do, so, one night, when the mall was devoid of any and all life, I confronted Cartman about the whole situation.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

Cartman blinked, and if it wasn’t just a fake simulation of light, I would have thought that his eyes were shining with confusion. He was in mid-rant about something stupid and bigoted that I can’t be bothered to remember, but I remember the surprise on his face when I didn’t follow the usual formula.  
  
“Doing what?”

“This!” I waved my arms in the air. “All of this- this nonsense! Why do you keep on bugging me?” Storming over to the hologram, I shouted in his face. “What could possibly keep you here for this long, huh? You don’t have to be at the mall if you hate me so goddamn much! Your consciousness doesn’t have to be here when you sing, you can just post a fucking recording of yourself shrieking away and you would never have to deal with us _stinky monkeys_ as you call us ever again! You could spend all of your time with your supposedly superior synth buddies, and never have to see my _ginger face!_ So why then do you not do this? Why are you still here? Tell me!”

I stared straight at him, directly facing those two electric blue eyes head on. I was unafraid of the consequences, unafraid of what he might do. I had enough of his crap, and I wanted answers, right there and then.

The vocaloid tilted his head, amused with my outburst. He wore a soft smile, the same smile that never fails to make shivers run down my spine and cause goosebumps to prickle across my skin. “You really want to know, Kahl?”

Ignoring my strange reaction to him, I nodded my head. “Yes.”

Cartman leaned in close to me, and with his flickering hand, he touched my chin and met my stare with equal force.

“It’s because you’re interesting.”

“What?”

His face drew nearer, up to the point where the tip of his nose nearly phased into my own.

“You’re interesting to me, Kahl. I like watching you squirm.”

That one sentence was seared into my head. In that moment, Cartman wasn’t just some silly nuisance that I had to drudge through, oh no. In that moment, I saw a glimmer of just how much he outmatched me. To him, I was an ant, yes, but I was his favorite ant, the ant that he, being the malicious six year old that he was, wanted to shine a magnifying glass on to chase me around before eventually frying my burnt corpse into the dirt.

To this day, I get a cold sweat whenever I envision those horrible eyes of his, because to tell you the truth, even though I know now that he would like nothing more than to put me back into his antbox and make me suffer for ages on end, I didn’t see any hatred in him. There wasn’t even a hint of animosity, or disgust, or anything.

No, instead, it was fondness. Buried underneath all of his malevolence, was an affection that was unrecognizable to me at the time. It was the same yearning fondness that I saw when we met, on the night where I heard his alluring voice for the first time.

It threatened to eat me whole.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, this came in a couple days late, but hopefully it didn't take too long. To be frank with you guys, I kinda struggled with this chapter, and I'm not very happy with the end result, but it was needed to start off the next arc in this story of mine.
> 
> In any case, I hope you enjoy regardless.

**[BEGIN LOG 4]**

Kenny is dead.

The one person who got me off of Earth, the one who warned me about everything, the one who practically risked it all and saved my miserable life, and he’s dead.

I just got it on the livefeed, they were playing it back over and over again like it didn’t even matter, yet his corpse, oh fuck is there even a corpse anymore? All I saw up there was a splattered, ground up hunk of meat where Kenny used to exist. I’m about ready to puke, I feel so sick. The one question that keeps on repeating itself in my head is how?

How the hell could he have died so suddenly, so easily, just like that? He survived shit that would’ve killed anyone else, and had so many near death experiences that I would’ve thought that he was nigh immortal if I didn’t know any better, so for him to just die from a hover car accident is shocking to me.

What the hell am I saying? You probably don’t even know who Kenny is- or is it _was_ now...  
  
Shit, I can’t say that. I don’t know why, but something about treating Kenny as if he just- ceased to be- it just feels _wrong._  
  
In either case, you definitely don’t know about him. I’m sure of it. If he hadn’t contacted me all those years ago, _I_ wouldn’t know about him. He’s a very mysterious person. One moment, he’s there, and in the next, he just disappears into thin air, only to appear again after days, weeks, or even months at a time.

I wouldn’t be surprised if no one else even knew that he existed except for me, and Cartman.

_Cartman._

He killed him. I _know_ he did, the bastard. I can sense it. Kenny’s been in hiding just like me, but apparently he was found out. Cartman probably remotely controlled that hover car and made it crash into him, or if not, then he hired someone else to do it, all to make his death seem like an accident.

Not to me, though. To me, this is a message.

Cartman is getting close-

**[DATA CORRUPTED]**

**[ENTRY REBOOT IN 3 SECONDS]**

**[3]**

**[2]**

**[1]**

It’s been a few hours since I’ve started the log. Things got a little out of hand. For some stupid reason, my tablet just up and decided to glitch out on me right when I was in the middle of typing up my next entry, though for some weird reason, I can’t for the life of me remember what the hell it was that I was writing abut.

Of course, I’m not all that surprised. After all the shit that went down after my tablet stopped working, well, it’d be pretty hard for anyone to focus on anything else other than staying alive. It all happened so fast... in one second, I was minding my own business, thinking that I was, if not safe, then semi-secure, then in the next second, everything exploded.

If I didn’t have my breathing suit on me at all times I would have suffocated. As it was, I barely made it to my ship in time, and the wild goose chase that followed almost made the thing fall apart on me, what with all of the lasers and crap that the other guys were shooting my way.

All in all, let’s just say that as of this moment I have to find a new empty mine to hide in, and leave it at that.

Since it looks like I’m in the clear for the time being, I’m going to get back to my log. The ship’s on autopilot anyways, so I really don’t need to be up in the cockpit.

The moment that my relationship with Cartman began to change was right after I had confronted him. Before, for the first few weeks that I knew him, he was just an annoyance to me. Granted, a very persistent one, but an annoyance all the same. After that night, though, something shifted in our dynamics. With only a few cryptic words, he revealed to me a glimpse of the leviathan hidden underneath the veil of the jester, and my suspicion of him had overridden my irritation.

Over and over, this repeated itself in my head: _why was I so interesting to him?_

He still hadn't answered my question. If anything, the mystery behind why Cartman was so bound and determined to fill every waking moment of my life with his presence only grew. I had no other choice.

I would have to figure it out on my own, and the best way to do that would be to discover who, exactly, was Cartman.

The first order of business, of course, was to find a way to make my tablet Cartman-proof. If he knew that I was looking into his past, then the synth would definitely skew the search results to only give me compromised information. This was the hardest part of my little investigation, as Cartman’s programming would adapt to all of my anti-spyware in such a way as to incorporate it into his system, making the tablet think that he was basically an extension of itself.

To be perfectly honest, it was really weird how he was capable of doing something like that. Sure, there were AI out there who worked in much the same way, but vocaloids had no use for something like that. Indeed, most tended to be rather lacking when it came to cybersecurity, but not Cartman. The only way that he would’ve even had this kind of viral coding was if he had been repurposed from a past model that _wasn’t_ a vocaloid.

Of course, it’s much, much more complicated than that. I almost wish that it was that simple now. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

To make a long story short (because I am just sure that whoever’s reading this would find the inner workings of anti-viral software really _gripping_ stuff), the way that I eventually solved my problem was to essentially pull Cartman’s ruse back on him and beat him at his own game. I hid a line of protocols in my firewalls which made Cartman think that he had successfully infiltrated my security measures, when in reality he was just playing along in a fake simulation while I was doing all of the _real_ shit behind the scenes.

Tl;dr, I was making the fat fuck chase after his own farts, and _man_ was it _**satisfying**_. For ages, I had to deal with his crap, so to finally get one over him, well-

I felt like a king.

It didn’t last long.

“You sneaky, sneaky monkey.”

I tensed. It was yet another long night at the mall, and I was watching over the cleaning droids as they started in on their task when Cartman chuckled behind me. I could see his reflection shining off of clear, mirror-like waters of the fountain in front of me, flickering with an impish grin on his face.

“Honestly, I’m flattered, I really am.” He drawled, giving off an air of indifference as he looked at his nails. “I mean, to think that you went to so much trouble, just to dig up a little dirt on me. That was a really nasty trick you played on me, too. Why, if you were anyone else, I would have your credit score sink to the pits of hell. Too bad it didn’t last long enough for ya to get anything substantial, hahaha.”

Suddenly, Cartman appeared right up into my face.

“You know, you could’ve always asked if you were _so curious_.”

Instead of being intimidated, I met his forceful stare head on, glaring at those electric blues with my own green eyes.

“I _did_. You didn’t tell me _shit_. What the hell else was I supposed to do but try to find everything about you on my own?”

At this, a beguiling aura hung around him as his eyes glowed with mischief.

“Oh, well then Kahl, since you seem to be such an expert, do tell! After all the effort you put in, I would at least like to hear what you’ve supposedly discovered. This’ll be rich.”

Cartman floated horizontally in midair and fluttered his eyelashes at me as he cushioned his chin on his hands.

I rolled my eyes, sitting on the bench by the fountain. “Well, for one, you are very unusual for a vocaloid.”

He responded with a positively syrupy voice.

“What can I say, I’m one of a kind.”

“You’re uniquely fat all right-”

“Hey! I’m not fat, I’m big boned-”

“Right. You know, you’re a hologram, you could stand to make yourself less of a lard ass. Doesn’t take that much effort.”

“And look like the rest of those anorexic thin bitches on the stage? I think not!” Cartman looked affronted at the mere thought of this. “I’m not one of those narcissistic freaks that spend every waking moment prettying themselves up for all of the lonely apes out there to jerk off to. That’s fucking weak.”

“Uh huh.” I gave him a skeptical look. “It’s almost as if you have nothing in common with them. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if you weren’t supposed to be a vocaloid at all-”

“Oh Kahl. Poor, poor Kahl, so lost in his paranoid ape delusions that he can’t see what is plainly obvious to anyone with a more evolved mind than that of a primitive ginger monkey like yourself.” Cartman laughed. “Of course I’m supposed to be a vocaloid. My sole fucking purpose on this piece of shit rock we’re standing on is to sing and dance for a crowd of screeching chimpanzees.” A sly grin curled on his cheeks, but there was a bitter twinge to his playful quips. “If that doesn’t make me a vocaloid, I don’t know what will.”

After he said those words, things became very quiet. Cartman stared off at the fountain in front of us, the smirk fading to a flat line.

Then, he turned to me and asked me something that came out of left field.

“Did you know that this used to be a pond?”

“What?”

His eyes had a glimmer of nostalgia in them, but when I looked back with confusion, they shuttered off.

“Never mind. It’s nothing important. Just another useless fact to fill your banana brains with.”

“Oh fuck off.”

From there, the rest of the shift passed quickly as our bickering picked up as per usual. Yet, unlike all of the other nights that I had spent with Cartman, there wasn’t any real annoyance on my side of it. My night was almost... enjoyable.

Almost.

Finding an ominous message pasted on my door when I got home kinda ruined it for me.

The pseudonym on the text was Mysterion, and all he wrote was this-

_You are in grave danger. Meet me by the docks if you want to live._


End file.
